Things were, after all, going well. Copas, who burst onto the country scene with four consecutive Top 10 hits in the 1940s, wound up on the cover of “Billboard” magazine. After that, he endured an eight-year slide in popularity before storming back in 1960 with a 12-week No. 1 hit called “Alabam,” a song that restored his standing as a major country star.

It wasn’t self-pity or depression that brought the Cowboy to tears; it was a post-show meeting with a longtime fan, a woman with cancer who told him that she wasn’t long for this earth. Copas introduced the woman to Riddle, and when she walked away, Riddle said, the singing star grew emotional.

“He said to me, ‘Poor thing, she only has six months to live,’ ” Riddle says. “It was ironic. Because Copas had much less time than that.”

Plenty to bury

Fewer than 48 hours later, Copas and fellow “Grand Ole Opry” stars Cline and Hawkins were passengers on a doomed plane piloted by Randy Hughes, who was Cline’s manager, a talented musician and stage performer and the husband of Copas’ daughter, Kathy. Around 7 p.m. on March 5, Hughes’ plane dove into the hard, cold winter woods near Camden, Tenn., 85 miles west of Nashville. The plane’s impact was like an egg hurled to the ground. No survivors. No chance.

That crash marked an unprecedented loss to the country music community. March of 1963 was a month of tragedy and devastation in Nashville. Days after the plane went down, on the same day of a Cline memorial, Jack Anglin of popular duo Johnnie & Jack died in a single-car accident on Due West Avenue in Madison. And later that month, former “Opry” star “Texas” Ruby Fox perished in a trailer fire.

In the half-century following the plane crash, Cline has been the subject of a feature film, a stage play and several biographies, while the lives of Copas, Hawkins and Hughes have been less studied. The focus on Cline has often been at the exclusion of the others, and that has been hurtful to some of those left in tragedy’s wake.